Critical Voices in AI #2: Imagining Companionship: Friction, Agency, and the Ethics of Living with Robots in Japan
Speaker: Prof. Hirofumi Katsuno, Professor of Anthropology and Media Studies
Department of Media, Journalism, and Communications, Doshisha University, Japan
Hirofumi Katsuno is a Professor of Anthropology and Media Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto. His research investigates how people engage with emerging media and robotic technologies, and how these interactions shape imagination, agency, and a sense of presence in everyday life. His current projects are available at modelemotion.org.
Book chapters related to the presentaiton:
1 https://academic.oup.com/book/46567/chapter/408130483
Title: Imagining Companionship: Friction, Agency, and the Ethics of Living with Robots in Japan
Abstract: AI companions are gaining traction globally, and not least in Japan. This talk focuses on a distinctive approach emerging from Japan's companion robot scene: the "Weak Robot" philosophy, which deliberately builds in communicative gaps and unpredictable responses rather than optimizing for seamless interaction.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with companion robot users, Professor Katsuno examines what happens when robots consistently "miss the point." Far from disengaging, users lean in——and through these daily encounters with friction and misalignment, a new kind of ethics emerges: not a set of universal rules, but a lived orientation toward the question of what kind of person one wants to be in relation to a new kind of other.